Unnamed
by Sassynails
Summary: Sawyer gradually realizes Kate's gone. PG13-nish for some language and implied things.


It takes a while for this to sink into him

It takes a while for this to sink into him. His very being fights it and his rum-damaged brain refuses to even give it a proper reference. It doesn't feel right to call it truth, or possibility or even a thought to entertain, not yet, too early. The fuck with 'too early', it's never. It's nothing, not gonna happen. Only been an hour.

For all he knows, she could be swimming back right now. A ridiculous, irrelevant smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. She's a good swimmer, isn't she? And she does have a survival instinct cockroaches would die for. That's a good one there. He'd tell her that when she emerges from the wind-whipped waves, exhausted and raw from effort and adrenalin and horror running through her veins and seeks the comfort of his arms.

He knows she will. She will stumble out to the shore, panting for breath, and make it directly into his embrace. She's always so uninhibited when the circumstances get dire and he loves it about her. He'd draw her to the safety of him, ineffably tender, and tell her the stupid joke. Nothing gets her shit together as well as a dumb untimely joke does.

It's only been an hour and it took him almost two hours to get to the shore. Just another hour – and he'd see the dreamy slitting of her eyes, when he refreshes her still seemingly lingering taste on his own lips and let all the convoluted games they have played go to hell, left behind the confine of his tent.

XXXXXXXXXXX

Six hours pass and the pillar of smoke from the explosion, so ugly and alien with the background of paradisiacal azure dissipates into the darkening skies streaked with ocher and red of the setting sun. He curses the rum which dulls the edge of his thinking and his bad eyesight, but keeps watching the waves with a dogged tenacity for a bundle of chocolate curls or any other sign. Or anything unusual, anything at all.

She could have lost her direction, couldn't she? Might as well end up a few miles down the beach and take time to figure out which way to go. She's a good tracker, a little sly feline creature which knows her way about the jungle. She'll make it. She'll make it and make him proud of her. Again.

He still refuses to move from his vantage point, as if it would immediately break the elaborate spell of hopes he has woven which, somewhere deep down he already knows are false.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

'They're not coming back, Sawyer'. The always opaque expression on Juliet's face, when she says it, almost two days later, makes the devastating truth even more unbearable.

'They're not coming back.' This time she pronounces it softer and her voice is slurred with a sharply defined emotion, which he could have already sensed, if he had any ability left to sense anything. Anything at all.

It takes for what was flowing through his denying mind to be articulated by another person for it to finally dawn on him.

She is gone. Her shy smiles, twitching the corners of her lips are gone. The way the tendon on her neck strained when she turned her head to look at him, slightly askance, is gone. Her cute little toes, which she always used to wiggle into creating miniature sand dunes around her feet are gone. Her heady scent, her laugh, her secret, intimate look when he touched her. All is gone.

How did it happen? Did she feel anything? What was the last thought on her mind?

He hopes to all deities he can think of that it was instantaneous, that she never had the time for that last thought.

"Come on, Sawyer. There's a storm brewing. You have to get to the shelter". Juliet insists mildly.

She sees the wary inkling in his eyes, which kindles them into some semblance of life and knows that he hears the first remote reverberation of what is to be a sweeping thunderstorm. Of what is to become a marking of the end of his life and the beginning of his mere existence.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Two weeks later and he's reduced to a single post factum wish. He wishes he had told her he loved her again, before he jumped, and instead of the reserved affection and turmoil could see the sweet, dreamy radiance in all her features which he saw back there in the cages. The unguarded, warmth-exuding glow which, for him, at that moment, meant she loved him back.


End file.
